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Tuesday, May 8, 2012

The Obama Doctrine And The Lessons Of Iraq

By Dominic Tierney

American President Barack Obama

The
Obama Doctrine is like the Holy Grail. People have searched for it all over the
world. The Internet is full of theories about what it looks like. Skeptics have
doubted whether it even exists. The quest for the Obama Doctrine reveals a
president with the wisdom to resist doctrinaire thinking. But at the same time,
Obama’s focus on avoiding the mistakes of Iraq could itself prove dangerously
rigid.

One
of the reasons that the Obama Doctrine has seemed elusive is that the concept
of a “presidential doctrine” is used to mean different things. In one sense, it
refers to a tradition where each president gets to issue a single binding
pronouncement—amounting to one of the Ten Commandments of American foreign
policy. Back in the nineteenth century, the Monroe Doctrine proclaimed: thou
shalt not colonize the Western Hemisphere. More recently, the Truman Doctrine
held: thou shalt resist communist insurgency. And the Bush Doctrine declared:
thou shalt be with us, not with the terrorists.

In
this sense, there is no Obama Doctrine. The president has declined to issue
such a commandment and isn’t in any hurry to do so. Back in 2008, Obama said he
was “not going to be as doctrinaire as the Bush Doctrine, because the world is
complicated.”[1]

Obama
should be applauded for questioning the value of rigid doctrines. Simplistic
proclamations can become a straightjacket that constrains a president’s
options. This is especially true when we live in a complex world with diffuse
threats, as we do today. The Arab Spring, for example, with its distinct local
dynamics, requires flexibility, and even inconsistency. We don’t need the same
strategy in Libya and in Syria.

Presidential
doctrines have a poor record. The Truman Doctrine, for example, encouraged a
universal definition of U.S. national interests during the Cold War that helped
draw the United States into Vietnam. Other nations have copied many American
innovations, but they haven’t copied the presidential doctrine. Bismarck didn’t
have a doctrine. Neither did Churchill. As creative diplomats, these leaders
wanted flexibility in their foreign policy.

The
idea of a presidential doctrine can also be used in a looser way: to refer to a
president’s core foreign policy beliefs. After 9/11, for example, the Bush
Doctrine outlined a positive transformational agenda with four major elements.
First, the world was gravely threatening because an alliance of terrorists and
rogue states could inflict incalculable harm on the United States. Second, the
spread of democracy—even at the point of a bayonet—would undermine terrorism
and serve American interests. Third, the United States would act unilaterally
when necessary. Fourth, the United States would protect its position of
unchallenged primacy.

In
this looser sense, the Obama Doctrine does exist. For sure, Obama has continued
and even enhanced the use of several Bush-era tools such as drone strikes. But
overall, the Obama Doctrine is designed less to revolutionize the international
system than to correct past errors.

Obama
is not, after all, a foreign policy president. His main goal upon election was
to solve the financial crisis and pursue his domestic agenda. In their
bestselling account of the 2008 election, Game Change, John Heilemann and Mark
Halperin captured Obama’s thinking as he courted Hillary Clinton to be
secretary of state: “the economy is a much bigger mess than we’d ever imagined
it would be, and I’m gonna be focused on that for the next two years. So I need
someone as big as you to do this job.”[2] It’s striking to compare the relative
caution of Obama’s foreign policy agenda with the expansiveness of his domestic
goals.

Obama
has dialed down all aspects of the Bush Doctrine. Obama’s rhetoric is less
militant and crusading on the importance of democratization, less apocalyptic
on the potential threats that exist, less enamored by the allure of
unilateralism, and less aggressive in asserting primacy through military spending.

Look
closer, and a central dynamic animating the Obama Doctrine is negative:
rejecting the Iraq War. Here it’s useful to take a step back and think about
how leaders learn from history. It’s commonplace for presidents to draw
analogies with the past, for example, referring to appeasement in the 1930s,
the Vietnam War, or U.S. intervention in Somalia in the 1990s. Sometimes these
historical allusions are just rhetoric, designed to decorate a speech. But they
can also powerfully shape how presidents think.

Interestingly,
leaders don’t learn from all of history. Instead, they make analogies with past
failures more than successes and they usually focus on recent events. This
means that the key source of learning is the last big failure. For the
post-World War II generation, the major lesson of history was “don’t appease.”
Then, after the 1960s, a new and powerful historical lesson emerged, “no more
Vietnams.” In the wake of 18 American combat deaths in the Battle of Mogadishu
in 1993—immortalized by the movie Black Hawk Down—the lesson was “no more
Somalias.”

For
Obama, the most powerful lesson of history seems to be “no more Iraqs.” It’s
hard to find any aspect of the Obama Doctrine that is not directly influenced
by the Iraq War. First, Obama has highlighted what Michael Doran calls an
“extrication narrative” based on a responsible withdrawal of U.S. forces from
the Middle East—especially Iraq. Second, compared to Bush, Obama is more
restrained about using force, and more concerned by the potential for unintended
consequences. Third, when force is employed, Obama favors precise and surgical
operations, including Special Forces raids and drone strikes. Fourth, Obama
supports multilateral military operations, especially if there is a large-scale
commitment. Fifth, Obama is averse to Iraq-style nation-building. The
Pentagon’s 2012 strategic guidance document, “Sustaining U.S. Global
Leadership” stated bluntly that: “U.S. forces will no longer be sized to
conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.”[3]

The
2011 U.S. intervention in Libya exemplified these five aspects of the Obama
Doctrine and represented in many ways the “anti-Iraq War.” Unlike with Iraq,
the Arab League and the UN Security Council supported the Libyan mission. The
United States played a relatively secondary role. Nation-building by American
forces was rejected out of hand.

In
addition, as a sixth point, the president has sought to shift America’s
diplomatic and military attention away from the Middle East toward a rising
China. The Pentagon’s strategic guidance declared: “We will of necessity
rebalance towards the Asia-Pacific region.” This represents not just a change
in regional focus but also in adversary: from asymmetric insurgents toward
traditional great power rivals. In November 2011, Obama announced that 2,500
U.S. Marines would be deployed to Australia. Symbolically, they’ll be about as
far away from Iraq as possible.

There
are exceptions where Obama acted in ways that echoed the Iraq War. Most
importantly, the president escalated U.S. forces in Afghanistan and adopted a
counter-insurgency strategy that is similar in some respects to the “surge” of
American troops in Iraq. But the president is now looking to wind down the
Afghanistan War and add a new chapter to the extrication narrative.

In
part, the centrality of “no more Iraqs” to the Obama Doctrine reflects broader
strategic and cultural forces. The cost of the Iraq War in blood and treasure
(5,000 dead and $700 billion expended), as well as pressures from the financial
crisis and the rise of China, would have forced any president to absorb the
lessons of Iraq. Indeed, Obama’s thinking is part of a wider backlash against
the Iraq War in American society, which political scientist John Mueller called
the “Iraq Syndrome.”[4] In November 2011, for example, approval for the war in
Iraq hit an all-time low of 29 percent.[5]

At
the same time, however, Obama may be particularly attuned to the lessons of
Iraq. After all, the Iraq War was central to his political rise. Obama’s
opposition to the conflict was a major reason why he defeated Hillary Clinton
in the 2008 Democratic primary. (Hillary voted to authorize the use of force in
Iraq, and she refused to apologize for this vote even when she became a critic
of the war.) Obama once said that he was not against all wars—just a “dumb war”
like Iraq.

Is
it helpful to focus so heavily on the lessons of Iraq? There is, of course,
much we can learn from the Iraq War. For one thing, regime change can unleash
unpredictable forces. This is a critical lesson because Americans often see war
in its purest form as a moralistic crusade to topple tyrants. Another related
lesson is the risk of overconfidence. The champions of the invasion promised
that stabilizing Iraq would be straightforward but these hopes proved to be
wide of the mark. Indeed, the failure to plan effectively for the post-war
occupation was one of the avoidable catastrophes of recent U.S. foreign policy.

Iraq
also reveals that when an administration is set on war, and controls the
intelligence data, there can be a lack of scrutiny from the media and Congress
about the strategic consequences of using force. The true debate only came
later—when the American boots were already on the ground.

But
the danger of the “no more Iraqs” syndrome is that it promotes exactly the kind
of doctrinaire thinking that the president has promised to resist.

Someone
attacked by a dog when he is young may develop a healthy wariness of dogs: once
bitten, twice shy. Or he may exhibit an incapacitating life-long phobia. And
the same is true with Iraq. We can either become suitably wary of the perils of
regime change, or we can develop a harmful phobia against anything resembling
the Iraq War.

As
the saying goes, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. But political
scientist Robert Jervis once noted that those who remember the past and learn
from it sometimes make the opposite mistakes.[6] No one should forget the
lessons of appeasement from the 1930s. But after World War II, American
presidents overlearned these lessons and saw every threat as the second
incarnation of Hitler—which must never be appeased. In 1965, President Lyndon
Johnson announced that he was sending U.S. ground troops to Vietnam because “we
learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of
aggression.”[7]

Today,
we’re in danger of overlearning the lessons of Iraq. First, the grave costs in
trying to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan have produced a powerful backlash in
the United States against the whole idea of nation-building. A tempting lesson
from Iraq is: let’s never nation-build again. Some go even further and believe
that the U.S. military shouldn’t prepare for stabilization missions. If the
military can’t do it, the military won’t be asked to do it.

One
problem is that Iraq is an exceptional case. If we put the Vietnam War to the
side because the United States was simultaneously fighting both an insurgency
(the Vietcong) and a state (North Vietnam), Iraq is the single most costly
counter-insurgency or nation-building mission in American history. Most
nation-building missions incur far fewer casualties. When the United States
helped to stabilize Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, for example, there were
zero U.S. deaths. We therefore need to consider the experience of nation-building
in Iraq as part of a broader sample of cases.

The
truth is that the United States is almost certain to carry out stabilization
missions in the future. For all roads, it seems, lead to nation-building, from
wars for regime change like World War II, Afghanistan, or Iraq, to humanitarian
interventions like Somalia, to peacekeeping missions like Bosnia and Kosovo.
The answer is to make sure that the U.S. military is highly trained at
nation-building—and then employ this tool with great discretion.

Second,
memories of the flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may
be powerfully shaping how the United States assesses the state of Iran’s
nuclear program today. Afraid of repeating the error of threat inflation, the
U.S. intelligence community has become far more skeptical about reaching
conclusions about Iran’s capabilities. The upside is that improved safeguards
and a heavy dose of caution may produce a more accurate viewpoint. Paul Pillar,
a former C.I.A. analyst, believes that current intelligence reports are based
on the facts. But he added: “Because intelligence officials are human beings,
one cannot rule out the possibility of the tendency to overcompensate for past
errors.”[8] Correcting for previous threat inflation, without overcorrecting
and downplaying menacing data, is a very delicate task.

A
third prominent lesson of Iraq is to use force multilaterally, in order to
share the burdens of war and gain legitimacy. But the NATO intervention in
Libya in 2011 revealed the challenges of multilateral warfare, with too many
cooks threatening to spoil the broth.

Napoleon
once said, “If I must make war, I prefer it to be against a coalition.” The
reason is that multilateral military campaigns can be cumbersome and
ineffective, and may suffer from a lack of leadership. In Libya, many NATO
allies had tight restrictions over what their militaries would do. The UK,
France, the United States and Canada, carried out most of the airstrikes.
Meanwhile, Spain, the Netherlands, and Turkey wouldn’t allow their aircraft to
engage in ground attacks.

According
to the New York Times, a NATO report “concluded that the allies struggled to
share crucial target information, lacked specialized planners and analysts, and
overly relied on the United States for reconnaissance and refueling
aircraft.”[9] Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates described NATO’s incapacity
in Libya (and Afghanistan) as a wake-up call, fearing “the real possibility for
a dim, if not dismal future for the trans-Atlantic alliance.”[10]

Of
course, Qaddafi was eventually overthrown. But these alliance problems could be
dangerous in a more difficult or prolonged operation.

In
summary, Obama should be credited for rejecting doctrinaire diplomacy. But the
Iraq War was such a negative experience for the United States that the idea of
“no more Iraqs” could become an idée fixe or a dangerously dogmatic position.
We must learn from Iraq but we can’t let a single case blot out the sun.

Notes & References

-This essay was published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute
in May 2012
-Dominic Tierney is associate professor of political science, a
senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and a correspondent at
The Atlantic. He completed his Ph.D. in international politics at Oxford
University in 2003.His most recent book
is How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (Little,
Brown, & Co., 2010). This essay is based on his remarks at FPRI’s Manhattan
Salon.

About Me

I graduated from the French University in Beirut (St Joseph) specialising in Political and Economic Sciences. I started my working life in 1973 as a reporter and journalist for the pan-Arab magazine “Al-Hawadess” in Lebanon later becoming its Washington, D.C. correspondent. I subsequently moved to London in 1979 joining “Al-Majallah” magazine as its Deputy Managing Editor. In 1984 joined “Assayad” magazine in London initially as its Managing Editor and later as Editor-in-Chief. Following this, in 1990 I joined “Al-Wasat” magazine (part of the Dar-Al-Hayat Group) in London as a Managing Editor. In 2011 I became the Editor-In-Chief of Miraat el-Khaleej (Gulf Mirror). In July 2012 I became the Chairman of The Board of Asswak Al-Arab Publishing Ltd in UK and the Editor In Chief of its first Publication "Asswak Al-Arab" Magazine (Arab Markets Magazine) (www.asswak-alarab.com).

I have already authored five books. The first “The Tears of the Horizon” is a love story. The second “The Winter of Discontent in The Gulf” (1991) focuses on the first Gulf war sparked by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. His third book is entitled “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: From Balfour Promise to Bush Declaration: The Complications and the Road to a Lasting Peace” (March 2008). The fourth book is titled “How Iran Plans to Fight America and Dominate the Middle East” (October 2008) And the fifth and the most recent is titled "JIHAD'S NEW HEARTLANDS: Why The West Has Failed To Contain Islamic Fundamentalism" (May 2011).

Furthermore, I wrote the memoirs of national security advisor to US President Ronald Reagan, Mr Robert McFarlane, serializing them in “Al-Wasat” magazine over 14 episodes in 1992.

Over the years, I have interviewed and met several world leaders such as American President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Margaret Thacher, Late King Hassan II of Morocco, Late King Hussein of Jordan,Tunisian President Zein El-Abedine Bin Ali, Lybian Leader Moammar Al-Quadhafi,President Amine Gemayel of Lebanon,late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, Late Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat, Haitian President Jean Claude Duvalier, Late United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan,Algerian President Shazli Bin Jdid, Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Siyagha and more...